Archives For
songbird

Quick tutorial shows you how to install Nightingale, open source fork of Songbird music player for Linux, in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04.

Nightingale is a free, open source audio player and web browser based on the Songbird media player source code. As such, Nightingale’s engine is based on the Mozilla XULRunner with libraries such as the GStreamer media framework and libtag providing media tagging and playback support, amongst others. Since official support for Linux was dropped by Songbird in April, 2010, Linux-using members of the Songbird community diverged and created the project. Contrary to Songbird, which is primarily licensed under the GPLv2 but includes artwork that is not freely distributable, Nightingale is free software, licensed under the GPLv2, with portions under the MPL and BSD licenses.

This simple tutorial will show you how to install Nightingale, a good alternative to the discontinued Songbird music player, in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.

Nightingale is a completely free, open source audio player and web browser based on the Songbird media player source code.

As such, Nightingale’s engine is based on the Mozilla XULRunner with libraries such as the GStreamer media framework and libtag providing media tagging and playback support, amongst others. Since official support for Linux was dropped by Songbird in April, 2010, Linux-using members of the Songbird community diverged and created the project.

Here I’m going to tell you that the popular Songbird Music Player project has been discontinued. For those who are looking for an alternative, check out Nightingale which is built upon Songbird.

Eric Wittman announced on the Songbird blog, “Unfortunately, the company has found ourselves unable to fund further business operations and as of June 28, 2013 all of Songbird’s operations and associated services will be discontinued.”

Songbird is a music player originally released in early 2006 with the stated mission “to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web”. On June 3, 2010, official Linux support for Songbird was dropped.

While thanking the users, investors, partners, developers of Songbird, Eric Wittman openly recommends the open source desktop media player Nightingale as an alternative.

To access the open source for the Songbird Desktop player, you can go here: